Free Press Staff Writer

If you go:

When bass player Stanley Clarke talks about the two teenagers in his band that he’ll bring to this week’s show in Vermont, he uses the word just about every jazz musician uses to describe what they all have in common: language.

“It’s a language that’s very specific,” said Clarke, who’ll play Friday in White River Junction. “When you wrap yourself around it there’s a certain being-ness, a certain way you are that really transcends age.”

Clarke will be joined at the Tupelo Music Hall by 19-year-old drummer Mike Mitchell and 18-year-old keyboard player Beka Gochiasvili, who Clarke said was heard in the Republic of Georgia by Condoleezza Rice, who, along with being a former U.S. Secretary of State, is an accomplished pianist. She helped arrange for Gochiasvili to come to the United States and enroll at The Juilliard School before he was a teenager.

Clarke said the two teens are “extremely, extremely energetic” but also very skilled. “They can surely play whatever you give them,” he said. “These guys are young but sometimes I have to look and remember that they’re actually that young. I don’t really treat guys who are 17 or 18 or 19 like they’re 17 or 18 or 19. I just treat them very professional.”

That sounds a lot like how Clarke got his start in the early 1970s in the band of Stan Getz. Clarke was a teenager, keyboard player Chick Corea was in his 20s, and both were being schooled by the band leader and saxophone player.

“Stan Getz really taught us and dealt with us like we were much older. It was great,” Clarke said. “Me and Chick, when that gig was over, we’d just hang out and talk about putting our own band together and what we would do, which we ended up doing.”

The band Clark and Corea put together, Return to Forever, helped establish the genre of jazz fusion. The Grammy-winning Clarke has taken part in a number of innovative collaborations since then, from the group Trio! with banjo phenomenon Bela Fleck and jazz-violin veteran Jean-Luc Ponty that created the biggest buzz of the 2005 Burlington Discover Jazz Festival to projects with drummer Stewart Copeland of The Police.

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Many mainstream music listeners became aware of Clarke in the early 1980s through his crossover albums with George Duke, the keyboard player who died of leukemia last year. Clarke was speaking by phone from California last week where he and vocalist Al Jarreau were working on a George Duke tribute album.

Clarke, who’s producing and playing on a half-dozen tracks for the album, said it’s nice to hear Duke’s music live on. “He wrote a lot of stuff, he was pretty prolific,” Clarke said of Duke. “He was kind of like a Duracell battery, he kept going and going and going until he stopped. I can honestly say I can’t remember a day when he wasn’t doing something with music.”

Clarke could say the same about himself. While working on the Duke tribute he’s also putting together an album of his own music, and he hopes to release both in September. He said the decline of jazz radio and record sales has had a freeing effect on him and many others.

“I find a lot of musicians are just making records and music (that are) just exactly how they feel,” Clarke said, adding that it’s hard to pinpoint where his own musical style is heading. “The one thing I can say is in my music there is improvisation, so the category of jazz would be slammed on top of that. I have a really great track with myself and my old friend Stewart Copeland which sounds like me and Stewart Copeland, whatever that is. I have a long piece of music with the old band I had along with the Harlem String Quartet. It’s hard to say what that is.”

Clarke spoke while gazing upon the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, Calif. He said he’s looking forward to the tour that starts Friday in Vermont because it will be “a breath of fresh air” – very fresh, in fact, as he’s coming from the warm West Coast to wintery New England. The fresh air comes from Clarke emerging from endless hours in the studio to play for just a couple of hours a night in front of hundreds of fans.

“The thing I like about going on the road,” Clarke said, “is I get to rest.”